


Blueberry Pie

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: M/M, Sad Ending, Toxic Relationships, emo hour who tf up, geez if you wanted something light and sweet this isn't it, i wrote this a long fucking ass time ago and only just unearthed it in my google docs, like the first time we met fp i wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 17:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12280908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: He will remember it later as the last real happy memory of the two of them, himself and FP Jones, irrevocably tied in his memory to the sun-hazy boardwalk and the way the back of the van trapped heat like an oven. The sugar-sweetness of blueberries when they’d kissed.They start drifting, losing touch with one another. Then one day he wakes up to the closest thing to poetry FP will ever write:You’re too good for me and I can’t give you what you wantI can’t touch anything without making it dirty.





	Blueberry Pie

**i.**

It’s like senior year, Fred thinks, helping his best friend through the trailer door, only a lot less fun this time around and his shoulders feel a lot older under the deadweight of FP’s body.

“Just get me to the couch,” FP slurs, and Fred walks him obediently to a flattened out sofa that’s seen better days. Helps him sit.

“Nice, huh?”

Fred looks around the trailer for the first time, at the minefield of beer cans, the wall of bottles built up beside the couch like a fortress. FP collapses back onto the couch and the springs under it scream like something dying. FP smiles at their noise.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d end up in a place like this?”

“You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy, FP. Always have been.” He undoes the laces on his friend’s boots, works them gently off his feet. FP seizes him by the arm as he does.

“Blueberry pie.”

The grip on his arm gets painful. “You remember, don’t you?”

The seaside. The mattress. The sunlight.

“Where’s Gladys?”

FP smirks, a jagged, ironic twist of the mouth. “I don’t know.”

“You haven’t got a number…?” The weight on his arm is intensifying, dragging him down toward the couch. He breathes in but smells only the liquor, nothing sweet, no sun. He knows if they kissed it would be more of the same.

 _You can’t go back again_ , he thinks. _You can’t go back again._

Their boys are in the car. He doesn’t know if anything else would have made him push his old friend off.

“Take good care of my boy, Fred.” He’s saying it just to say it. Fred’s not sure FP knows his son’s name right now.

“I will, FP.”

“I know you will,” says FP and looks very close to crying. “I know you will.”

 

**ii.**

He will remember it later as the last real happy memory of the two of them, himself and FP Jones, irrevocably tied in his memory to the sun-hazy boardwalk and the way the back of the van trapped heat like an oven. The sugar-sweetness of blueberries when they’d kissed.

They keep a bare mattress back there when they’re not carting around band equipment, sometimes for camping, often for sex. Fred lets FP push him down onto it today, hands up over his face for protection, laughing.

“Stop, FP, stop, I’m going to be sick,”

FP laughs, all skinny legs and floppy hair at eighteen, crawling over Fred on his hands and knees. “You didn’t eat half as much as I did.”

“I know, I know.” Fred catches FP’s face between his hands, kisses him sloppily, then pulls back and only beams at him. “My boyfriend the blueberry pie eating champion of Riverdale County.”

“Pie eating champions,” FP corrects him. He lets their two newly-won gold medals fall out of his hands onto Fred’s chest, which sets Fred off laughing again. FP grins helplessly and lets Fred tug him back onto the mattress, their tangled limbs sandy and damp with sweat, Fred’s lips sweeter against his than anything he’s ever dreamed of.

  
  
**iii.**

He’s lying on his stomach on the mattress they keep in the back of their van, and the boardwalk has cooled off enough for the night that they’re pressed comfortably skin-to-skin. Fred is has gone very still and quiet beside him, the roving amber of his eyes fixed on some far point in the distance, beyond the walls of their backseat.

Fred always seems to be expecting the great collapse of the world, thinks FP. He strokes Fred’s hair.

“Penny for your thoughts, Fred.”

“Just love you,” says Fred and smiles sleepily, turns over on the mattress and shuts his eyes at last. “That’s all.”

 

**iv.**

Then they’re eighteen, and FP’s making Fred cry as much or more than he’s making him laugh, and maybe he’d be able to snap himself out of it a bit easier if Fred didn’t look so goddamn pretty when he was crying, if he wasn’t able to coax an _I love you, FP_ out of him so easy when his face was all swollen and tender.

One day it clicks for him that he’s treating Fred the way his dad treats his mom, the way his dad treats him: making him feel small, starting a lot of sentences with “ _if you really loved me_ ,” The night it all collides in his head he locks himself in the bathroom and throws up, hopes in some perverse way he’s gotten the bad out of him, but knows the truth at the same time.

They have a few cupboard-rattling arguments, Fred grabbing his arm and begging him to quit drinking so much, FP holding Fred to his chest later and sobbing into his hair, telling him he loved him, he loved him, and he was doing everything wrong, he was ruining all of it, Fred still and small in his arms, offering a dull “you’re okay,” and “we’re not our parents” to the front of his t-shirt. He remembers telling Fred that if he knows what’s good for him he’ll stay away from him and never come back, but Fred doesn’t listen, not once. Fred’s never been good at knowing what’s good for him.

"You're a jerk!" says Fred once, eyes sparkling with tears, and it hurts more than any swear word he could have thrown at him. "You don't care about how I feel, do you?"

In high school they'd almost never fought. There’s a finality to this that sinks deeper in him with every word. He wants to tell Fred that he does care, he cares more than anything. He wants to tell Fred this will all be for his own good someday, that FP could never give him what he wanted: a family, stability. Real love. But he can’t find the words.

"Call me when you grow up, FP,” is the last thing Fred says to him that night.

FP never does.

 

**v.**

They start drifting, losing touch with one another. Then one day they go to sleep in Fred's room and he wakes up to the closest thing to poetry FP will ever write:

_You’re too good for me and I can’t give you what you want_

_I can’t touch anything without making it dirty._

Fred sprints down the front steps of his house like his feet have grown wings, would have run all the way to the Southside to find him, shaken the sense into him, told him he loved him now, he loved him forever, only he trips over the stupid goddamn baseball bat he’d left on his front lawn and then can’t find the strength to get up again, presses his head to his forearms and cries in the rising pre-dawn heat, as the first rays of light are hitting the sky overhead.

He stays on his lawn crying until the sun comes up, thinks about looking for him but realizes it’s no use, at least for awhile.

If FP didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be.

 

**vi.**

He sees Fred for the last time in a long time a few weeks later, as he’s mopping the inside back counter of Pop’s for some extra cash when Fred shows up to pick up his takeout.

He looks at Fred then - Fred who cried at Field of Dreams and the song _Rocky_ , Fred who thought every stray cat in the neighbourhood was put on earth as a gift to him and him personally, Fred who had always had at least two dates for every school dance if not three - and knows with incredible certitude and persistence of understanding that he will never love anyone this much again, and that whatever he does he will never be over him. Not in ten years, not in a hundred. Not as long as he lived.

  
  
**vii.**

They’re leaving the church by the time he gets there: the bouquet already thrown, the ground speckled with rice. He doesn’t see Fred among the nearest crowd of laughing groomsmen but Mary’s impossible to miss in white, the afternoon sun glowing off her cinnamon ringlets like a halo.

He pulls his motorbike up beside the curb and tries to stay out of the way - there is a long list of people he does not want to meet here, and Fred and his new bride are only fourth or fifth on the list. He’s not dressed for a wedding - quite the opposite, in his black motorbike leathers - and whatever his invitation had said about inviting him to be best man, this is not a place where he belongs.

It’s the kind of day that screams _Fred_ \- full sun, puffy clouds, blue skies and rippling grasses. The air smells like honeysuckle and sunlight. Kids in miniature formal wear are chasing one another through the newly mown grass, parents and friends laughing and crying and embracing. The church bells are chiming. A white car with tin cans tied on strings to the bumper sits waiting by the road.

“Never fucking could resist a redhead, could you, Fred,” he says out loud and feels tears rise hotly to his eyes, feels them spill over his cheeks, “Never fucking could, could you, you stupid, miserable -”

His throat closes up and he doubles over in the shade, crying with his shaking fingers pressed between his eyes, crying until he feels like vomiting but only dry-heaves miserably into the grass with his palm pressed to the ragged bark of the tree. Cries until the sun makes his head throb and his vision spin.

He tries his best not to look back as he’s biking away, but he does a couple times anyways.

  
**viii.**

Jughead asks a long time later. About their history. Why FP has a wedding invitation but isn’t in any of the photos. Why Fred never had a best man.

“Your dad hurt me in a lot of ways,” says Fred at last, looking anywhere but Jughead’s eyes, anywhere but Archie, hovering in the stairwell. “And a lot of them weren’t his fault.”

 _But some of them were,_ Jughead’s gaze says, eyes trained on his face. _Some of them were, and we both know it._

“I think you hurt him too,” says Jughead instead, and Fred only nods.

“Yeah,” he says tiredly. “I hurt him too.”

The seaside. The mattress. The sunlight. 

"Sometimes I wish I could fix it," he says. "But I don't know if he'd let me." 

"Why not?" 

"Because he's proud," says Fred. "And sometimes you can't." 

 


End file.
